


press play

by forty_three



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-05 20:01:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4193070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forty_three/pseuds/forty_three
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first milestone in their relationship is in Hanejima's apartment, is Hanejima's apartment itself, from the ornamental fish to the leather couches to his lanky presence and the movie on the TV.</p>
<p>(A boy waits, and a girl suffers, and they are kindred.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	press play

**Author's Note:**

> Written very long ago to commemorate the second season, but never published (until now aaa).  
> Inspired by Daisuke Ono's commentary in Otomedia: "From him developing this personality because of his brother you can already tell, but he's really a very, very kind younger brother. It goes to show you can't always assume that having more emotions is better."  
> Some description of gore. Allusions to novel-only content. I've never used AO3 before

 

 

("The sparrows outside the window

are chattering on the telephone poles"

Your words

were full of summer.

\- _Common Jasmine Orange_ , Jay Chou)

  


++++

 

The first milestone in their relationship is in Hanejima's apartment, is Hanejima's apartment itself, from the ornamental fish to the leather couches to his lanky presence and the movie on the TV. Ruri has been on hold with no news since Yodogiri landed himself in soup. Jack O'Lantern's representative, an audacious, lurid, bombarding man, had limboed under a multitude of finicky legalities to half-adopt her and rope her into a magazine interview with Hanejima, where they are meant to act like couples do - but naturally, interjected Hanejima's manager Uzuki - but preferably a touch shy to play off of Hanejima's babyface, interrupted the stern secretary from behind a clipboard - and so they were rehearsing in Hanejima's living room to those specifications. He with his unflappable public mien, and she with her long contemplative (clueless) silences and straying answers. Then she decided it would be a disaster, he promised to cover for her, and they are now marathoning Carmilla Saizou. If she deserved a choice she would rather be with the passionate, dashing kid on the screen than the statue beside her, so groomed and still he might as well be a doll, but this is reality, and Hanejima is not all that bad anyway.

Onscreen, a younger, ruffled Hanejima is batting away multiple minions (incubi? or was it dhampirs?) with a modified version of karate.

She'd hesitantly rested her fingers on his wrist a while ago, and he'd twitched but not responded otherwise. His skin is cool and supple as satin over the bone, soft on his arm as it was on his face from what she remembers, those weeks she spent painting his face, and she finds herself sucking on a lip contemplating... if it might billow just the same if she zipped a knife from his tailbone to the base of his skull and skinned him alive. Maybe then they can find out together if he is human, if his screams are as ragged and guttural as all the rest, if his heart just as slippery - or if his eyes will still be blank as he gasps through teeth, thrashing trout under fishmonger's scaler, water (water) sprinkling on the floor. Some... are like that.

Were. When she -

Stop it.

She sucks in a breath. But she knows she won't be able to kill him or anyone else now, no matter how much she tries, in every absent moment, to attune with the idea.

At her reaction Hanejima notices she's no longer paying attention to the movie, and looks at her in a way that could imply inquisitiveness with some imagination. She sighs. "Why haven't we broken up?"

He stills for a moment, more stationary than usual, as though he has ceased breathing, as though he is waiting, with patient endurance. With some imagination, hesitation. "Should we break up?"

"Don't ask me back."

He pulls back, transfers his gaze to the ceiling, cocks his head. (His wrist slides through her fingers like silt, the bump of bone round under her fingertips.) "But will you kill yourself, if we break up?"

He genuinely doesn't know.

She ignores the flit of _maybe_ in the back of her head. "Is this what it's about, then?"

"Don't be upset... I mightn't love you in the way a lover should, but I think, I'm sure, I think you don't need to die. You shouldn't be so angry at yourself all the time."

He's paused the movie, inconspicuously. Wiped his hand on his shirt and touched the remote on the leather arm of the chair. It's Carmilla's blonde sidekick cum love interest frozen on the screen now, mid-yell. There is blood down the corner of her lip. Zakuroya had complained about that, with his friendly sardonism: _so cheap_.

She lets her eyes shutter close, leans her head back on Hanejima's couch, and lets out a shaky breath, feels the chill down to her feet.

When she doesn't reply for long enough he continues.

"You have a unique perspective of the world because of your own experiences. I don't think that alone warrants the punishing kind of fate abandonment is. Especially not giving up on yourself so completely. I'm sure we can find a way together."

For someone who wants to save her his voice is so even it could be a metronome, and so flat. She does not need to look at him to know he hasn't blinked once. His lack of expression could be anything, but because it never is and never changes it becomes disquietingly, maddeningly serene. They stay that way for some time, her every breath a sigh and he silent as death. It's cold.

A long time passes.

"Hijiribe, could you look at me?"

One day she's going to sigh her soul out. "Why?"

"Look at me," he says. "I want to try saying your name."

 

++++

 

At one point in time some years ago it is freezing late autumn and Kasuka is sitting obediently outside the consultation rooms on one of those rows of wide plastic chairs, two woolen mufflers looped around his skinny neck, hands braced on the seat between his legs as if ready to vault. His calves swing back, forth and his head follows, thudding against the wall behind. It is poor posture. The chair squeaks quietly, resonating in the clinic post-hours. The scarves are each plaid in complementary colours, tucked and nestled under his collar, bright under the frigid lights. This version of Kasuka can still feel a tinge of real, nameless emotion; in the burning behind his eyes, the closing up of his throat that only tightens when he clamps down on the feeling, ruthlessly mechanical, until it begins to hurt more than the back of his head. He stops, hops off the chair with his hands as leverage, and pours himself a paper cone of water from the cooler. After he's finished with it he hesitates, tugging blandly at Shizuo's scarf around his neck, takes a small but solid breath through his mouth, and resumes his sitting. His expression does not change much.

In the future from this point there will be another point where he is outside this same room in Saitama for a check-up of Shizuo's, the first time in a very long while, skimming emails from his manager for updates, and Orihara Izaya will drop by to examine him with a smirk and needle him for reactions. To this first meeting he will only reply: We're probably quite similar, you could get along with my brother if you tried; we argue a lot too but we get by. To which Orihara will answer nearly snappishly, I don't feel like listening to someone with fish eyes, and go back to his needling, only to vanish again shortly after, interest lost. (Appetite gone.) At a certain distance from this point the line will trail off and events will grow detached from one another, because Kasuka will have reached his final form of nothingness and the same version of him will exist in all possible futures. His expression will not have changed much.

This time Shizuo lifted a motorcycle at a wrong angle. Kasuka reluctantly notes that motorcycles are probably heavier than the average refrigerator. He has, even more reluctantly, grown used to all of this. There was something there when he was too young to understand anything, before Shizuo's superstrength had even shown and he had only ever glared and huffed, but before Kasuka knows it years will have swept past in a kaleidoscope of camera flashes and LED lights, the seed of emotion with those years, gone before it had time to sprout; and eventually he will only be numb when he decides whether to call an ambulance or a taxi. One day in the future he will say that these were not good memories, and it will be edited out of the broadcast.

Uzuki will say, "Maybe you should talk less about your brother."

 

++++

 

"...Yuuhei." Tremulous, breathless, uncomprehending fear.

Hanejima - Yuuhei - has woven his fingers between hers now, leant in close enough the intentness of his icy expression is overwhelming, his presence weighing into her space even as she leans back. They have locked eyes, Ruri's terrified almond with his narrow. The movie is still on hold, like her career is on hold, like her life is on hold, but now Max Sandshelt and Hanejima Yuuhei are barging in on their own to press play at their own convenience.

"Yes?"

"Yuuhei. I said it." She doesn't ask him to move away because this is familiar, because back then she hadn't asked for permission when she pushed him down and threatened to kill him. This is fair. He brought her home that day because he wanted to be fair to her, too.

She realises that she wants to be fair to him, and she swallows, and the fear swallows her.

"I wouldn't mind," he says, entirely serious, "getting used to this - Ruri."

Then: "Stay with me, Ruri."

It is back again. Whether she has him prone beneath her, or like this, he crossing into her space like Godzilla ascending out of Tokyo Bay. Her heart is trembling, quivering, in pain and icing over. His eyes are flat as concrete. There is nothing. Or maybe somewhere in the concrete is a cryopreserved heart. On pause. Stay with me, Ruri. Her heart is hammering, clenching so hard it hurts physically.

"Don't you know I've killed people? Horribly..." (Coming to her senses shoulder-deep in someone's blood and ruptured guts, coming to her senses with a trachea dangling pendulously on her nails, coming to her senses on a white bed stained rose-black, to shrieking, copper sluicing down her throat, her own quickened breath magnified in the silent, damp, claustrophobic vaccuum of her prosthetic headpiece, and _not regretting_.)

(Feeling sick to her stomach.)

(Regretting. Not wanting to regret... Regretting... The nausea, nausea... Weak limbs...)

"I know you're Hollywood."

"Then - ..."

Suddenly it hurts. Suddenly even breathing is agony and the oxygen seems to be carving a million microincisions in her lungs, setting them on watery fire until it too burns away and it becomes the lack of air that sears. Suddenly she is dizzy and everything is blurring, Hanejima's eyes and then their tangled fingers when she looks down and away. _Then_? Then what? Hollywood was _everything_.

( _I don't need... I don't need this guilt. Monsters don't feel guilt - be the machine, Ruri -_ )

(If his screams are...)

Wasn't it? Live the life of an avenger. Crush the people who violated you. The end. No after, no _then_. The end of her broken, twisted dream.

( _Why was I suddenly able to become a monster, something I had been so sure that I would never become?_ Why is it making me so miserable that I've become what I've always wanted to become?)

Sometime from when they met Hanejima palmed a knife between her ribs and she's only feeling it now. That there is a future at all.

She never wanted to live so long.

Hanejima flashes her a tired smile then, and it feels like it's the most genuine part of himself he has shown her this far, the true form of that knife, because she tastes the same curve rising on her own lips in response, so stale it's curdled and beyond the brink of tears. It's the realest he has ever been, and it feels like if she just reaches out she might be able to feel his pulse lumbering steady against his ribs, like they finally exist on the same plane of unbearable exhaustion. For that one moment, unhinged in time, they are both the same. Human, monster, anything.

Then his expression morphs, softens and hardens for the hundredth time into the frustratingly familiar magnanimity of Carmilla Saizou, and he quotes, with the same overpowering intensity of Hanejima Yuuhei:

"'There's always a second chance.'"

Normal people don't believe in second chances.

But norms don't apply to Hanejima. She wants to be like him, be him, be the monster.

(Be the machine, Ruri.)

"You're such a weirdo, Hanejima."

 

++++

 

He is being edited out of broadcast.

Draining away.

By a gigantuan weight, displaced out of himself, don't think about it too much. Show business helps, where the weight is gone and he finds himself smiling and exalting miscellanies with a remarkable buoyancy, but off the camera he is still slowly losing his mind. It is partially a force of habit. Every other day there is mindblowing violence, and every day he resolutely avoids thinking about it; Shizuo doesn't want to think about it. There is a sense of obligatory pity at their circumstances, a hint of blistering heat he refuses to name because it feels like that would change things, and the clenching of his throat. These are the tolerable and shrinking boundaries of Kasuka's emotions. This iteration of Kasuka is fifteen and the most deadpan person his classmates have ever seen, though it's kind of entertaining to their half-matured humour.

The thing is, he should really stop caring so much about what his brother wants, but the thing is also that his brother happens to be extremely important to him. He knows there is something wrong with himself and it is worrying; but this is something that makes Shizuo feel better, something that Shizuo can find constant and sane in his typhoon of a life. Shizuo wants him to not be afraid, wants him to have faith. He will say it as many times as it takes, on sundowns on the playgrounds or in a bottle of milk on the table through the exam period or twenty bartender uniforms in the future. You shouldn't change jobs too much.

Who can say this is the wrong way to live? Who can stop him? Then he feels lost, and the heat flares. Then he clamps down on everything, and his throat starts to hurt until he remembers to relax and be everything he needs to be.

One day he will introduce himself as Yuuhei by default. This will make things easier. He can be a person for some hours every day, in a controlled environment. Then he can rest for a little while, or a long while, and it will not be unpleasant to say that is his real self. Ruri will call him by his stage name, and he will hope he can learn to be a bit more of that, more, with her. She won't dislike him, even knowing what he is, and that will be a salve to the burning, which he will no longer feel physically. Max has always called him Yuuhei by default, or Mister Yuuhei, or Superman, or some other disproportionate title. He's a nice man under the atrocious accent, painfully parental. Show business - show business has been, is, will be, good for Kasuka. Kasuka, who cannot feel and would rather not right now.

If Shizuo can bear living with himself, Kasuka can bear absolute silence smouldering in his chest for as long as it takes. It's okay.

He tugs on his brother's scarf, and bows his head when a receptionist walks past to the exit. Later on when Shizuo comes out of the room his brother says that he's fine, that he's not cold at all, certainly not half as cold as his twig of a little brother, so hold on to that scarf since you need it more. His voice is gruff with shame and frustration, so tight he might be close to tears. They are both shivering by the time they get to the subway, at which point Kasuka passes the scarf; they don't stop shivering until they get home and away from one another.

Until they put some distance between them.

 

++++

 

(The weight destroying him is his brother. The spring tightening his throat is his brother. The burning of his eyes, the momentum when he thuds the back of his head on the wall, the devastating cold when he goes out without a coat. He knows.)

(But they're brothers.)

It's okay. He'll get better someday.

 

++++

 

"You're such a weirdo, Hanejima."

 

"It's Yuuhei."

"You're a weirdo. Yuuhei."

"I'm aware. I'm trying to improve on it."

"..."

"Is something wrong?"

"...There's no rush. We have a lot of time."

"So we're not breaking up?"

"...Just press play already."

"Of course."

 

++++

 


End file.
